


Reality/Reality (Song to the Siren Remix)

by unveiled



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Ableist Language, M/M, Remix, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-13 01:19:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/818272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unveiled/pseuds/unveiled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He should have understood it to be the curse it was, from the very beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reality/Reality (Song to the Siren Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ikeracity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ikeracity/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Reality/Reality](https://archiveofourown.org/works/536326) by [ikeracity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ikeracity/pseuds/ikeracity). 



Erik found her in the rubble of what was the Hague, dreamily sipping coffee at a cafe in Scheveningen. He hadn't thought to look, at first — why would he? There were thousands of places like that little ruined cafe. Its doors were broken, the windows swinging off rusty hinges, and splinters of glass and wood littered the floor. The air smelled of mold and dust. 

Irene Adler's table was an oasis of impossible calm, a circle wiped clean of death and ruin, and polished with lemon oil. She wore an ankle-length black dress, heavy with lace, fastened at the throat with an ivory brooch. Her hat and its black veil hung off a knob on her chair. A white damask napkin covered her lap.

She raised her head as he approached, placing her cup back in its saucer and daintily dabbing her mouth. The table was set for two: a silver coffee pot with a matching sugar bowl and milk jug, slices of spekkoek and almond pastries on a fine porcelain dish.

"You lasted two years, this time. A little below average," Irene said. Her blind, pupilless eyes blinked slowly as she waited for him to sit. "I suppose you'll be wanting another chance."

*****

Irene had found him the first time, the first timeline — the one where he had shattered Charles's spine and heart and never came back — when he'd been standing over Charles's grave. Erik's eyes were dry. His tears had long been wept dry over the mutants who died in their hundreds after Charles, felled by the Sentinels and their abhorrent, terrible force.

It had been too much, in the end, even for him. Mystique had died in Detroit, the last of his Brotherhood. He was once again alone and grief-stricken, with a poverty of options.

He had watched Irene approach — a woman with white hair and a youthful face, her cane tapping gently on the grass — and felt weariness turn into concrete in his veins. Erik was an old man now, and he was tired. If this woman was an assassin, he thought, so be it.

"Hello," she said, when the tip of her cane clacked against the vase of flowers at Charles's grave. "I knew Charles — he was an acquaintance, a great man of letters. I'm sorry for your loss, Erik Lehnsherr."

"Not as sorry as the world will be." He stared at her, trying to place her face. "You hardly look old enough to have known him while he was alive."

"I'm older than I look." She seemed amused by it, in the manner of a private joke. "My name is Irene Adler."

"Are you mutant?"

"Oh, yes. Precognition." Her gloved hands tightened around her cane. "I've seen what is to come. We will soon be the last two mutants left alive on this earth, Erik Lehnsherr. Which is why you must stop it."

Erik laughed — he couldn't help it, and the laughter burst bitter and rough from his chest. "Miss Irene, I am as good as an army against the Sentinels, but I'm only mortal."

"I don't mean the Sentinels, my dear man. I meant: Charles dying. That was the beginning of our end."

*****

Erik managed six months, when Irene sent him back in time after their first meeting. He hid his memories deep in his mind, behind the walls Emma Frost taught him to maintain. Charles clung to him with a strange, fervent gratefulness, and he slipped into the role of the perfect lover with ease.

What more could the universe want? He had turned away from Schmidt's helmet and all-out war, settling into the quiet life of a teacher. He needed only to avoid Raven's occasional looks of betrayal until he was sure that she was still Mystique on the inside, and ready for the secret training he was planning for her.

He had it, he thought. Until one day, when he was sweeping clean the scorched, ruined kitchen — courtesy of Alex's plasma beams — and caught sight of the headline on the morning paper.

_MONSTERS AMONG US_ , it screamed.

He picked up the newspaper with shaking hands and brought it to Charles, thrust the front page in Charles's face.

"They _lynched_ him," Erik shouted, slamming his fist on Charles's desk. "They strung him up and killed him, and no one so much as lifted a finger to help him."

It was easy to convince Raven to follow him again, and to find the Brotherhood where they had scattered. They saved a mutant, and another, and another.

But by the end of spring Charles was dead at the hands of a soldier, and mutant blood poured like water across America.

*****

Irene aged, slowly, though Erik remained in the newly-restored body of his youth. "Until the day I die," she had assured him.

He should have understood it to be the curse it was, from the very beginning. Irene appeared to him in the glory of her mortality: a new dress, new wrinkles around her eyes, new calluses on her fingers. Erik's life rewound itself with each one of Charles's deaths, doomed to fail, and fail again.

*****

The second time around, Charles lived long enough to taste the first of the early blackberries in summer. They'd made love in a meadow the day before he died, surrounded by soft grass and the hum of insects.

The damnable thing, Erik thought, was that it hadn't even been the United States government and its human hawks who killed Charles. It was Emma Frost; who, forgotten even by himself, had burrowed deep into the palaces of power and was now ensconced in their heart. Schmidt had wanted to level the world with fire, but Frost was content to let it be — with the exception of those she saw as threats to her power.

Erik was uncertain, at first. For all his grief over Charles's death, could it not be the price they had to pay for the ascendancy of mutants? He closed his ears to news of humans and dissident mutants alike herded into factories, and the militarisation of the USA's long borders, and shut his eyes to the anger in the faces of his students.

He had forgotten, or chose to forget, that the students of his school were as much Charles's as his, and raised with Charles's principles — until they died trying to undo Frost's shackles upon the nation. And he should have known, should have remembered, that there was a bigger world out there, and it would find them.

*****

"Take me back," he said, time after time, "before Cuba."

He hadn't thought it would be so _hard_. Erik tried his hardest to forget the timeline where they encountered En Sabah Nur, but in his next jump back in time, he tasted only ashes in Charles's kiss.

*****

"You never quite explained to me," he said to Irene, as she poured out a cup of coffee for him, "why Charles's death was always the catalyst for our end."

She smiled, thinly. "In another life, I think he would describe you and him as bookends of the same soul. I like to think of you and Charles as a pair of scales, myself, but that's quite beside the point."

Irene placed a slice of cake on his plate. "Charles _is_ a catalyst — a whirlpool in the sea of time, one that changes the course of everything around it. In every future where Charles Xavier does not exist, mutantkind dies with him. It doesn't matter whether you and he are on the same side, as long as he lives."

"I've tried watching over him from afar. Three times."

"I can't keep doing this, Erik," she warned. "Charles is experiencing the alternate timelines as lucid dreams. If you don't get it right soon, we might irreparably damage his psyche."

"What would you have me do?" he growled. "I have tried— more times than I care to know. I remember all the timelines — _I_ might be the one driven mad. What more can I do, Irene? What haven't I tried?"

She picked up her fork, neatly cutting off a corner of her pastry. "Perhaps we are sending you to the wrong point in time. Have you thought about returning _after_ your misadventure in Cuba?"

Erik flinched. His teaspoon rattled against the saucer.

"I can't possibly— why would Charles—"

"Accept you? Or is it that you can't accept him as he is? A _cripple_." The word twisted viciously in Irene's mouth, and Erik remembered that Irene was blind, despite her serene omniscience. "Are you truly that human, Erik Lehnsherr?"

"Charles is the most powerful mutant I have ever met," he said flatly, stung. Irene, unmoved, lifted a forkful of pastry to her lips. Erik pushed back his chair. "He needs more than what I can give him— after. I can't give up my cause to play house with him, Irene. I did what I did not just for him, but for all of mutantkind."

"And you don't believe that Charles is as dedicated to _his_ cause?" She paused, considering. "Perhaps you do. Perhaps that's the problem. You don't see a way out of your impasse. You return again and again to the time when you were lovers — was he more pliable then? More open to your ideology? As if love was ever enough to change either of your destinies." 

Erik opened his mouth, but Irene raised a hand and shook her head. "Never mind, you can't listen to what you won't hear. Now, shall we begin again?"

"Yes, the usual time." Glass crunched under his feet as he stood. He would get it right, Erik thought, for as many tries as it took. He hesitated. "No, perhaps— no. The usual time. Again."


End file.
